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We are planning a lot of exciting content for patch 3.1.0, and we are doing a three-part preview series on upcoming class changes. This is the first in the series: Priests, Rogues, and Shaman. Please keep in mind, that this list is not at all comprehensive, and subject to change.

Divine Spirit – this spell is now a core ability available to all priests.

Discipline has access to a new talent, Power Word: Barrier. (Think of it as Power Word: Shield for your whole group).

Several area of effect (AOE) heal spells have been improved: Prayer of Healing can be cast on any groups in your raid party. Holy Nova’s mana cost has been reduced. Circle of Healing now heals for more.

Shadow priest PvP survivability has been improved: Shadow Form now reduces magic as well as physical damage. Dispersion now removes snares.

Penance – this spell can now be targeted on the priest.

Serendipity – this talent now reduces the cast time of Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing when Binding Heal or Flash Heal are cast.

We are also working to give Holy additional PvP utility.

So *looks up at the post* Yeah! Hells yeah? Oh yeah!

Divine Spirit is out of my tree. WOOT! I wonder what will replace it? Matticus belives it will be PW: Barrage. And what a lovely, lovely thing it would be. I’m not convinced yet that it will be a straight swap. I wonder if they will do some reshuffle with you having to take Improved DS to get PW Barrage. But its all speculation and really just the thought of Barrage makes me giddy. Make me like Disc more? Yes please!

I am very curious to see the numbers on the Circle of Healing increase (does it make up for the cooldown?) and cost reduction of Holy Nova. How well they do balancing these AOE spells is very important.

The change to Serendipity is nice for Holy I guess…I’m not holy anymore Its hard for me to want to get worked up. I see it as a good thing. Haste = good/yum. The changes aren’t sexy enough for me to go Holy again. Disc is too sexy, I like mitigating damage too much to change my ways now. (course I said the same about Shadow in BC and we all know how that turned out)

Overall I love the changes, but I’m skeptical about Bliz making changes, all classes have been ‘improved’ by Bliz only to have those same improvements yanked away at some point that I’m not going to jump up and down just yet. Also its just pre-release notes its not live and until then its all smoke up my robe. I know I’m such a downer!

As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.

Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.

Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.

To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.

The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.

Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.

In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.

We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.

We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.

These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

Notice it? No more oo5sr! Secretly I am pleased of course. How can I not be? I hate the damn in and out dance. Its part of what made me go disc in the first place. I’m not convinced this won’t be like before though when spirit was a freaking joke. Like I said before I’ll wait and see.

And I loled when I read that the Mandatory spells would be more mandatory. How does something become more mandatory? You just make the mandatory more rewarding for having.

I don’t like that they assume everyone is going to run someone with replenishment in it. Its simply moronic. Trust me my 10 man Nax didn’t, ever. And just giving it to other classes isn’t enough, it has to be worth going into that spec to be done. But enough ranting this is a pre-release it ‘s not live yet and in my WoW life yet so *shrug* lets wait and see. Coffee anyone?

Special thank you to MMO Champion for posting the Blue Bliz notes. Ya’ll rock!